Zurbarán, Master of Detail

For the first time in Germany, a retrospective comprising around 70 works will be dedicated to the Spanish Baroque painter Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664) by Museum Kunstpalast. Zurbarán, is regarded one of the most important representatives of the Spanish Golden Age. The exhibition will also introduce a number of the rare still lifes by his highly gifted son Juan de Zurbarán (1620–1649). The show includes works which to date have never or rarely been presented to the public.
The Spanish Baroque painter Francisco de Zurbarán may be regarded, in a modern literal sense, as an artists‘ artist, as his painting style characterised by precise composition and stupendous materiality fascinates artists to this day. In her last coherent series of works created in the 1990s, the German-American photographer Evelyn Hofer (1922-2009) tackled the challenge to explore his rare, exquisite still lifes. Against a deep black background she staged fruit, flowers and jugs to form perfectly arranged pieces of art. The photographs were created using the complex dye transfer technique, which make the motifs shimmer with a very special chromaticity. Evelyn Hofer is regarded as the “most famous ‘unknown’ photographer of the United States”; her still lifes are shown alongside the major Zurbarán retrospective.